Iranian girls are typically portrayed in widespread tradition and the media extra as symbols than as precise folks. They’re steadily lowered to unforgettable and contradictory photos: the willowy ingenues of Persian miniature tableaus, housewives of the Sixties and ’70s frolicking in miniskirts and bathing fits, a sea of nameless all-black chadors after the 1979 revolution, and, lately, protesters shedding and burning their veils.
In 2025, it’s laborious to think about any chronicle of Iranian girls forgoing point out of Girls, Life, Freedom—the game-changing protest motion in opposition to obligatory hijab and the Islamic Republic’s patriarchal regime that adopted the 2022 demise of Mahsa Amini (also called Jina), in police custody in Tehran. And but, to this point, I haven’t come throughout many mentions of WLF in modern world literature. The omission is perhaps attributed to the motion’s lack of clear-cut denouement, or maybe to the truth that most of the gamers might haven’t but come of age (the common age of arrested protesters was simply 15). But it surely additionally appears attainable that many authors aren’t certain the way to write about Iranian feminine id, a topic that may lend itself extra to iconography than to realism.
One solution to keep away from this pitfall is to set the story 1000’s of miles away, removed from the homeland, in one of many many Iranian diaspora communities that flourish worldwide. I’ve accomplished this with a number of of my very own novels, the final most explicitly so, with the title screaming the setting: Tehrangeles, which takes place in Los Angeles’s vibrant Iranian West Aspect enclave. Mariam Rahmani’s debut novel, Liquid, takes place in a distinct L.A.—not the certainly one of loopy wealthy one-percenter influencers and content material creators that I portrayed, however certainly one of grad college students, queer on-line daters, and disaffected Millennial dreamers. Right here, the East Aspect, extra humble although additionally extra self-consciously hip, figures prominently. Not since I learn Khashayar J. Khabushani’s emotional debut novel, I Will Greet the Solar Once more, have I encountered an Iranian L.A. so acquainted to me in its mildly dystopian urban-suburban geography, laconic wit, and depressive sultriness.
Liquid’s unnamed narrator, who lives on this bleak milieu, is at probably the most relatably difficult factors in life. Simply previous 30, as frightened as she is about her profession (she’s lately accomplished a dissertation), she is much more involved about her dismal love life. It seems the 2 dilemmas is perhaps extra related than they at first seem—and that fixing her romantic predicament might really render her job troubles moot.
She makes a plan—“a queer adjunct professor decides to marry wealthy … to be able to write a guide on companionate marriage primarily based on her dissertation”—and decides to dedicate her free time to frenetically paced on-line relationship, meticulously recording her encounters on a spreadsheet. Rahmani renders the protagonist’s anecdotes deliciously, with the crispy edges of probably the most satisfying rom-com: the Korean American trust-funder who lures her to his household’s Palm Springs property, the butch lesbian producer within the Hollywood Hills whose Porsche she dents on her means out, the engineer with a Z4 who surprises her together with his open marriage. After which there may be the platonic-so-far greatest pal from school: Adam, who is consistently navigating the repeated rock bottoms of an on-again, off-again relationship together with his serially untrue girlfriend. He appears to be one attainable answer to the narrator’s romantic troubles, however their tender friendship ends in every kind of delicate dances for the majority of the guide.
Rahmani’s novel seems to be much less predictable than a number of the above tropes may point out. Earlier than the narrator makes any significant progress in her seek for a rich partner, the story takes a pointy flip and all of a sudden we’re elsewhere: Iran. After the narrator’s father has a coronary heart assault, she abruptly takes off together with her mom, who lives within the Midwest, to are likely to him. What the reader may not count on is that even in Iran, she finds romance, though of a form that’s very totally different from her flings in L.A. Whereas the California components of this guide, centered on the narrator’s numerous relationship mishaps, really feel charmingly acquainted, nothing in Iran goes fairly as deliberate. The narrator extends her journey properly previous her mom’s keep and her father’s demise—even previous her sapphic fling with Leili, her mysterious ceramicist neighbor—and he or she imagines what it will be wish to exist on this universe, the one which many Iranians pressured into exile might by no means encounter once more.
Rahmani is in some ways reinventing the Iranian American novel, subtly but considerably. In books akin to Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! and Sanam Mahloudji’s The Persians—and even most of my very own—Iran is an emblem of all that has been misplaced as soon as one leaves the nation behind. However in Rahmani’s novel, the nation is an precise setting for flesh-and-blood characters relatively than a silent specter. Rahmani’s universe is rarely quiet; the whole lot is spoken, typically exhaustively and exhaustingly, in writing so electrically alive that the reader feels totally immersed in her world. In anecdotes about going out for a kebab sandwich, purchasing for Persian fruit leather-based snacks, looking bookstores, negotiating taxis, even getting fingered by her kohl-eyed neighbor, Rahmani’s realism is so ruggedly tangible, so trustworthy to its particulars, that at instances it’s straightforward to overlook that this can be a novel, not a memoir.
Different parts of the guide break away from the mould of typical Iranian, and Iranian American, fiction. For one factor, the narrator is of blended ethnicity (she is half Indian and half Iranian), which you hardly ever see depicted in such tales. Iranian novels additionally have a tendency to incorporate in-depth explorations of sophistication; in Rahmani’s guide, nevertheless, we don’t get a strong grasp of our narrator’s financial scenario. She is an underemployed adjunct but in addition steadily goes to expensive spots and buys costly issues. And naturally, a number of of her love pursuits are girls, placing an attention-grabbing queer spin on historically heteronormative Iranian love tales (Akbar’s Martyr!, with its queer protagonist, is an exception).
The novel’s power additionally lies partly in its prose: Rahmani’s writing is closely carbonated and winkingly self-aware. Taking footage for her dating-app profile in a single scene, the narrator positions herself in entrance of a pomegranate tree and thinks, “Slightly self-Orientalizing by no means killed anybody.” And Rahmani hardly ever rests on clichés, even in probably the most offhand description. When she writes that “in illness my father was lowered to the neon moods of a petulant little one,” I couldn’t assist however pause. Kids’s moods, at their worst, will now ceaselessly be “neon” to me.
Essentially the most predictable—and maybe disappointing—a part of the guide is its ending. I gained’t spoil it, however followers of rom-coms may already guess the flip it takes from earlier on this essay. I couldn’t determine whether or not Rahmani’s conclusion was a cop-out or whether or not she was merely delivering on the reader’s expectation for a little bit of formulaic cuteness—and due to this fact breaking one other rule of Iranian fiction, and Iranian love tales specifically, which often finish in a labyrinth relatively than a neat bow. In any occasion, loads of romance novels fill their readers up with frosting however provide no basis; Rahmani’s novel has each. Though I anticipated one thing extra uncommon, the basic rom-com ending jogged my memory that typically all you need is a little bit little bit of sweetness. Even in flirting with conventionality, Rahmani comes out on prime.
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